Regional focus/area studies

Nature and artifice: debates in late Warring States China concerning the creation of culture

Article Abstract:

Confucians believed that human culture derived directly from nature. Mohists asserted that culture was directly created through human innovation and artifice and was disconnected from nature. The issue of the creation of culture was intensely debated by subsequent philosophers of the late Warring States period during the 3rd century BC. Their debate increasingly centered upon use of the term zuo, which often meant create, but could also mean to lift or cause to arise. Ultimately, the belief that culture was lifted up from the natural world exercised the most influence on future Chinese thought.

Narrative as argument: the 'Yuewei caotang biji' and the late eighteenth-century elite discourse on the supernatural

Article Abstract:

Ji Yun's 'Yuewei caotang biji' has been approached as literature or folklore, but is best evaluated as evidence for the existence of the supernatural in context of late 18th-century debates among the Chinese elite. Ji Yun collected encounter stories, tales involving supernatural causation and inexplicable anecdotes to provide a mass of evidence for the existence of spirits. Essays from the same period relied more on ancient texts. The elite tended to uphold the existence of the supernatural because it supported the existing moral order.

The persistence of the personal in late medieval Uta

Article Abstract:

Japanese poetry was bound by strict rules governing everything from prosody to diction in the 15th century. By that time he ancient uta form was a highly codified genre, and historical records state that all uta were composed in an almost ritual setting, according to strict standards of performance and etiquette.